[openssh] Re: sshd takes 15 minutes to start

[Darren Tucker]

Ben Lindstrom wrote:
[about kill -9'ing hung rand helper subprocesses]
> kill -9ing may not be a bad idea for things that don't honor "please shut
> down now", but I don't like the idea of abandoning the child process.

If it didn't respond to kill -9 then you're stuck with it no matter what
you do, the only options you have are waiting (possibly forever) for it or
abandoning it.

> If an OS company is not coding things to be signal safe and it now becomes
> a zombie it may be out there until a reboot at worse.  Quietly filling up
> the pid table.

Are there platforms where init doesn't wait() for orphans?

The biggest concern I have is that ssh-random-helper currently has a
failure mode that will render a machine inaccessible via ssh (or worse,
will prevent a it from booting properly).

I'm thinking that ssh-rand-helper should wait, say, 10 seconds then kill
-9 the subprocess, wait() for another couple of seconds then log it as a
problem and abandon it.

The delay and log will mean that it should be obvious there's a problem,
but it will work eventually.  At the moment
there is no such guarantee.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
    Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.